Galaxy Song - Monty Python Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough. And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, And you feel that you’ve had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff! Just - re-member that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving and revolving at 900 miles an hour, It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power. The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a day, In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour, of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way. Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars, it’s 100,000 light-years side-to-side, It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick, but out by us it’s just 3000 light-years wide. We’re 30,000 light-years from galactic central point, we go round every 200 million years, And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe. The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whizz, As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know, twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there’s bugger all down here on Earth.

Just got back from a Relient K concert in Philly. My wife and I were lamenting not having ever been to a Relient K concert despite the fact that they are on our top tier of bands when I decided to check the website. I found out they were playing in Philly and wouldn’t be anywhere else near us for the foreseable future. So, after a few phone calls determined that tickets were still available, we got into the car and drove the two hours to the concert. It was Rufio, Relient K, and MxPx; we stayed for the first two. I like MxPx, but not quite as much as I like Relient K; Rufio went first so we had to see them. It was weird being the oldest people there besides parents who took their tweens to see the concert, but we had a great time.

I recently found something interesting - a record label which releases all of its music under the Creative Commons license. In particular you are allowed to copy the music as long as you don’t make money off of it. One of their strategies? If you rip a CD for a friend and they really like the artist, they will buy the music. I think this is true as I have recently bought “Mmmhmm” by Relient K, “Dichotomy A” by GRITS, and other CDs I could have easily downloaded. Below is a letter written by one of the founders/owners of the record label - Fading Ways which I loved. I will reproduce it and write comments where appropriate.

Life always good - today it was better than usual. Can’t talk about it right now because of professional reasons, but I just have to thank God for being in control and also giving me a little to chew on here and there so I don’t get too impatient.

Also, later today, the big slope day expose. Tune in for nudity, Snoop Dogg, and more drunken college students than you can shake a stick at.

There’s a very hackneyed saying, “don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today.” For a while now I had been putting off talking about the new Anberlin album and now Andrew beat me to it. I had been listening to “Ready Fuels” for almost six months before I got around to buying the first album, Blueprints for the Black Market. I almost immediately fell in love with the band’s music. I put it on my workout playlist and it was what I listened to for about a month and one half while working out. My fiancee said it was the first time she had heard an album where she liked every single song. When I found out they had come out with a new record in February, I set out to buy it.

I bought the Erace album when it first came out and I think I was just a freshman in high school if not younger. I really liked the rap put out by Gotee records courtesy of GRITS, et al especially because back then they had more of an experimental and underground sound. They’ve recently sold out, in my opinion, by sounding like every other rapper out there. But that’s not the subject of this post, so I’ll save it for another time. At the time I was unable to realize just how creative this song was. I used to play it over and over because I really liked the beat and the raps weren’t too bad.

This Roper song is my second favorite song on the album Brace Yourself for the Mediocre. Although I was quite young at the time, I still identify with a lot of the aspects from “my decade”.

“1985” By Roper

On the back of the schoolbus singing, “I Love Rock and Roll” put another dime in the jukebox, Let the Good Times Roll Grab the back of a Buick Skylark just like Michael J. Fox Grind the trucks on your brand new skateboard just like Tony Hawk Delorean those days are gone We could breakdance, Pop-lock our wrists kid before your grunge rock ever existed

This song is one of my newest favorite songs and so I thought I’d share the lyrics with you. Part of what I love about this song is the fact that I was acting this way for a while at Cornell and I could have used a song to point out how ridiculous I was being. It’s about trying just hard enough to not be the worst. For a while I just wanted to get the curve. Then I realized how bad that was. I needed to strive for the absolute best and never settle with being on the curve. The lyrics are great and Reese proves once again why he has a legion of fans.

Every year we have a celebration on the final day of the school year on Cornell’s Libe Slope. It used to be a drunken orgy but it has morphed, in recent years into a concert with over-priced food and an ugly orange fence which makes getting to classes very hard. A couple of years ago Fat Joe was the lead act. Last year Kanye West was the headliner, although I didn’t get to see him because they weren’t allowing video cameras in and it was too much of a hassle to get back to the apartment. This year we’re getting Snoop Dogg along with some no name rapper. What’s interesting to me is the fact that a school as white as Cornell has had rap acts for the past three years. I’m not being naive or racist, saying that white people can’t listen to rap. I know they listen to rap.